Sunday, 7 April 2013

Game of Thrones2x09 Blackwater
This episode has been hyped since I-don't-know-when; certainly, long before season two even began airing. But it lives up to all expectations, because it's phenomenal. The action is quite incredible, but also the drama within the city's walls. It's a shame it cost them so much (a bonus on top of the season's regular budget) that we're not likely to see it repeated, because they can clearly pull off a battle incredibly well given the money.

Beginning a re-watch of the Harry Potter series, which will hopefully continue weekly for the next couple of months.

This will be the first time I've seen most of the films for years -- this blog kicked off in the middle of 2008, and since then I've only watched thelastfour; and 100 Films started at the beginning of 2007, and I've only watchedthefinalfour since then too.

By my reckoning, it's at least 8 years since I last watched Philosopher's Stone. The view count therefore is a guess; but I can say with certainty that it's the first time I've seen the extended version. It's around 7 minutes longer, but, even though much of the film was incredibly familiar, after so many years I have no idea where those new minutes were.

It may lack the epic world-changing grandeur of Lord of the Rings, but as an epically-scaled action-adventure fantasy I found if to be most entertaining. It treads a tricky path mixing action, humour, world-building, politicking, legend, and plot... For me, the balance worked.

Even if directorially and cinematographically The King’s Speech isn’t the triumph a film lover might like their Oscar winners to be, it’s more than made up for by an exceptional screenplay and an array of highest-quality performances.

It’s thoroughly predictable — most viewers could probably map out the plot before the film even begins, so it’s certainly easy to guess what’s coming next as it trots along — but there’s also something reassuring about that predictability — it’s exactly the sort of Quaint British Movie you expect it to be.

It’s generally taken as a rule that an original film is better than the remake, particularly so if that original is in a language other than English and the remake is American. But there’ll always be something to buck the trend, and in my view that’s Insomnia.

this is not a “whodunnit”: the killer’s identity is revealed around the halfway mark (assuming you haven’t already guessed it from the opening credits) and from then on the film gradually moves into murky moral territory, quickly leaving behind those early trappings for a set of more complex noir-ish moral conundrums.